Parking ticket scam makes its way to Halifax

(Legitimate) parking tickets sit on the windows of vehicles on Granville Street in Halifax. (FILE)

Some Halifax-area residents have been finding fresh scam emails parked in their inboxes lately.

Emails that appear to be associated with parking giant Impark describe parking violations, complete with a ticket number and an outstanding fine amount. The catch for Haligonians is that the phoney offences happened in Toronto.

“There is absolutely nothing that we can do about it,” said Julian Jones, corporate development vice-president for Impark, which operates nearly 3,500 parking facilities in more than 240 North American cities.

“It’s actually been going on for just about a year,” Jones said from Vancouver. “It started last December. It’s not only affected us. We’ve seen similar emails relating to a parking company in Australia, and also a similar email which purportedly came from the City of Winnipeg. . . . One consumer did some research and found that it originated from somewhere in Russia. We have no control over it.”

Impark operates a number of parking lots and garages in Halifax and Dartmouth, including outlets on Portland, South, Granville, Hollis and Upper and Lower Water streets, and the IWK and Park Lane parking garages.

The email notice is sloppily written, with a number of misspelled words and misplaced punctuation. The notice provides a number of hyperlinks, including a link to a non-existent picture of an officer ticketing your vehicle. The email includes the Impark name and a logo.

“We have obviously received calls and it is clearly a concern for us,” Jones said. “People who do business with us are concerned about it. The one thing I can say is that we do not actually ever communicate with consumers about parking notices by email. If you actually think about it, there is no way we could know your email address from having received a parking notice. That’s an indication that clearly they are fake.”

Jones said Impark has followed through on the emails and “it doesn’t look like there is even any request for money.”

“It may be a phishing scam for some information but there is not much we can see that they can actually benefit from it. It is certainly a problem for people who receive it.”

Const. Dal Hutchinson said the local RCMP has not yet received any complaints regarding this type of scam.

“People who are doing these scams are becoming more creative,” Hutchinson said. “Some of the emails they send look quite realistic and legitimate.”

He said if it was an email about a parking infraction in Halifax, recipients here might get alarmed that they were ticketed without realizing it.

“But if it is something that just doesn’t make sense, delete the email and move on.